If there were any lingering questions as to whether Intel would use its 22-nanometer Tri-Gate process technology to bake chips based on the ARM architecture, the company's CEO has put them to rest.
"The short answer is 'No'," Paul Otellini told his audience at Intel's Investor Meeting 2011 in Santa Clara on Tuesday in response …

Well it looks like ARM has a business plan?

Quote

According to Otellini, one server is required for every 600 smartphones or 120 tablets. And since Intel and its Xeon processors rule the server roost, as he put it, "the money is in the infrastructure."

Profits

Exactly

Look at that price - who is making money on it?

ARM is doing very well but overall profits and profits per worker are *much* lower that Intel. nVidia, Qualcomm, TI, Samsung are the rest are all busy making ARM chips that they can't sell for very much: the hardware is becoming commodified. Which premium manufacturer wants to be in on that?

Intel will now be spending heavily convincing people that their software really needs those Intel cores. They might even succeed with notebooks et al. where aggressive power management and the lack of real computing show them in a reasonable light - Intel's process engineering is second to none. If any data centre is able to get a reasonable TPC workload from an ARM based server they will probably never look back.

AMD

You've got to wonder why AMD don't get in on this trick - they have a great mobile graphics core, but lack a decent mobile processor. Put their GPU together with an ARM CPU and they are on to a sure fire winner. And best of all - the open source drivers for both already exist.

those Intel Linux webserver boxes

Others may not, given that Intel denied for years that it could be done and then denied they were doing one and then when IA64 was stillborn they did the sensible thing and released an AMD64 clone.

Other suggestions please: An Intel success in a market where Windows is irrelevant (like it or not, Windows has some relevance in the generic x86/x86-64 server market). Y'know, something like maybe routers (consumer, big iron, in between), supercomputers, peripherals, whatever.

Re: those Intel Linux webserver boxes

"You may class AMD64 as home grown Intel. Others may not, given that Intel denied for years that it could be done and then denied they were doing one and then when IA64 was stillborn they did the sensible thing and released an AMD64 clone."

I doubt that Intel seriously meant that it couldn't be done. The IA32 stuff has had various extensions bolted on over the years, and even the 80386 supposedly had capabilities for greater than 32-bit addressing (according to Tanenbaum whose book I don't carry around with me, so I can't check). It's more about that it wouldn't be done: the future was VLIW and Itanium, remember? When no-one agreed, Intel had to change its corporate mind.

AMD's success in the server and HPC space in the middle of the 2000s apparently had a lot to do with HyperTransport and bandwidth. Intel were apparently really lagging until they brought their Core series stuff online.

"it is 32 bits, so you are stuck with 4 gigs of RAM."

Wasn't true for some PDP11 ("16 bits" and >>64KB of RAM (up to 4MB max, some caveats apply) back in the 1970s.

Wasn't true for some IA32 pre AMD64 ("32 bits" and >4GB of RAM, some caveats apply).

Won't be true for some next-gen ARMs ("32 bits" and >4GB of RAM, some caveats apply).

The main caveat was and will be that no individual process can concurrently address more than 32bits worth of memory address space. But the system as a whole can have more than 4GB (32bits worth), or maybe any individual process can address >32bits (e.g. the whole 4GB and more) by remapping its address space, and that's usually what matters (some caveats apply), at least until 64bit virtual address spaces become worthwhile in general.

Those who ignore history are doomed. In particular they are doomed to look silly and/or repeat history.